This is a sprawling, gorgeous epic of a novel that spans nearly a century. What moment or character provided the initial seed for the story?
I had actually been working on a different novel for a couple of years when the first image from what would become A History of Burning popped into my head—and wouldn’t leave until I wrote it down. What I saw was a family sitting around a kitchen table as a bat flew in through the window, and I knew that it was in Kampala, Uganda, and that it was 1971 and Idi Amin’s military coup had just taken place outside. That scene didn’t actually make it into the final novel, but it introduced me to the family at its heart.
From there, I began to write my way further into those characters, and that’s how I realized that this wasn’t where their story began—I knew that Rajni, one of the matriarchs of the family, had been through these experiences of dislocation and family separation before, during the partition of India in 1947, and so I jumped back to that time period. That kind of character-driven expansion of the narrative kept happening, and eventually led me back to 1898, when Pirbhai is taken from India to East Africa to work on the railroad.
At heart, it’s a novel of exile and displacement, following several generations of a family from South Asia to Eastern Africa and on to North America. How and when did the thematic and historical scope of the project begin to come into view for you?
After that initial seed of a scene came to me, I understood that I would be writing a novel inspired by the experiences and history of my family and community. I didn’t know exactly what that story would be at first, but my process was very much guided by my own questions about our history, because there was so much I didn’t know—it’s not something we spoke about much at home. That curiosity led me into the research process, which was a combination of combing through archival documents and academic and creative work, and doing many oral interviews with members of my family and community who had experienced this migration and exile from Uganda.
Between all of that and my own interest in the impacts of colonialism, in legacies of resistance, in intergenerational memory and storytelling, the historical and thematic scope of the novel began to emerge. In the end, though, this is a story about family, about love, and I tried to hold that—the characters’ desires, in all their entangled ways—as the main force of this book.
As readers, we meet so many incredible characters, each of whom experience hardship and displacement through the ongoing violence and trauma of colonialism—but all who find ways to survive and make lives filled with joy, celebration, and self-discovery. Who was the most challenging character to portray and why?
All of the characters in this book presented different challenges to write, but this was especially true when characters would make difficult choices, acting in unsavoury or questionable ways. There are two characters in particular that I’m thinking of here, Pirbhai and Latika, who both make very difficult choices under incredibly painful and constrained circumstances, and who must live out the consequences of those actions. No matter how I felt about those choices, though, I had to treat those characters with immense compassion. I had to allow them their complexity and mistakes and messiness and growth. The way through the challenge of writing those characters was to centre love as I wrote them.
The novel ends in the early 1990s, in Toronto. I’m curious why you chose to finish the story there?
This book is interested in the cyclical nature of things—how certain ideas or memories are passed down, whether verbally or through the body, how history and stories repeat themselves, how a choice we make can come back again and again and how we can choose to respond differently. I knew the second half of the novel would take place in Toronto, because it’s not only where many Ugandan exiles ended up after the expulsion but also where I grew up, a place I know intimately and was very interested in exploring through fiction. Without giving too much away, the novel ends during the racial uprising in the early 90s in Toronto, which felt like a culmination of many of the novel’s themes such as complicity and resistance and kinship, and a chance to reflect on all that has passed and all that might be carried forward.
Finally, one of the powerful threads of the story is how generational stories are both passed down through time and rewoven or reworked to make sense in the present. In your opinion, why is fiction such a powerful vehicle for telling historical narratives?
For me, writing fiction is a way of making sense of the world. Writing this historical narrative gave me the chance to think through larger questions about home and safety and belonging, questions that existed in the past and persist into the present. There is so much to be learned from the ways that the present contains the past, and the ways the past foretells the present, and with storytelling we can draw those connections out and make them human. That’s the thing about fiction—it’s a way of connecting. A story is a way of bringing these grand historical or sociopolitical events down to the level of the person or the community, and that’s where we find the emotional truth.
Excerpt from A History of Burning
Sonal, 1902
When the coolie arrived at her deddy’s shop to ask for a job, the first thing Sonal noticed was his arms. They were long, lanky, but tight balls of muscle strained against his dirty cotton shirt. She wondered what kind of work he must have done to get arms like those, but then she saw the missing middle finger on his right hand, the nub puckered and flayed like it never properly healed, and the way he hobbled in his too-small chappals like an old kaka though he looked barely twenty, and she knew his line of work.
Deddy was knee-deep in a mud pit out back, piling scraps of torn packaging and rusty tin cans to burn. It was garbage day, and Deddy was never in a good mood on garbage day. He had put Sonal in charge of both the shop and several of her siblings for the morning, while Mummy rallied the youngest few to feed. At the counter, Sonal peeled a worm of dirt from under her fingernail and clicked her tongue at her brother Nanu, who was pretending to twist open a jar of pickles, rolling his eyes back in fake pleasure.
“If Deddy sees you,” she warned, but it was ruined by her grin.
Nanu, buoyed, plucked a small sack of sugar from the shelf and hefted it over his shoulder.
“Don’t,” Sonal said, the smile gone, but she was too late. Nanu tossed the sack toward her, but his arms were reedy and his calculation off. The bag smacked the counter, and sugar ballooned in a golden cloud, the grains settling into every surface like sand. Nanu stared at Sonal, aghast.
Sonal heard the clank of Deddy’s shovel and knew there was no time for scolding. She grabbed the rag from the counter and got down on the floor, the crusty granules grating her bare knees. She heard Nanu fetch the broom from the corner, and when a pair of hands appeared next to her, she assumed it was another one of her siblings come to help. But then she noticed the missing finger, the muscled arms, the skin like date palm bark, dark and scarred.
“Almost there,” the boy said, as if he knew her, showing his wide, straight teeth. She stood and folded her arms, waiting for him to say who he was, but he just kept working, his head down.
By the time Deddy came back in, Nanu had resacked the dusty sugar and the boy had his hands behind his back as if he had just strolled in to browse. Behind him, out the open door, rows of corrugated iron shanties crowded around the railway tracks, Kisumu Station coated with a blanket of ochre dust. When no one was looking, Sonal brought a finger to her lips and licked, the shiver of sweet settling thick on the back of her tongue.
Excerpted from A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza. Copyright © 2023 Janika Oza. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.